All titles may not be immediately available. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - T O D A Y Would you rather walk? Discuss your travels by foot in Table Talk. Michael Palin interview Don George chats with the humble and impish actor/author about world travel, Monty Python and not being particularly good at anything. (11/18/97) R E C E N T L Y Road Warrior Chris Gulker (11/17/97) The Surreal Gourmet By Bob Blumer Dinner and a video with a tasty trout recipe (11/14/97) Mondo Weirdo By Andrew Brown A charming -- and cheap! -- French château (11/14/97) Open Lands By Mark Taplin Travels through Russia's once-forbidden places (11/13/97) The Aussie way of Wanderlust By Tony Wheeler Lonely Planet founder: Why Aussies are traveling fools (11/12/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A full list of all Wanderlust articles		full Circle______ | E X C E R P T | By Michael Palin 320 pages Nonfiction St. Martin's Press + + + + + + + + Michael Palin's "Full Circle," a book that accompanies the TV series of the same name, recounts Palin's extraordinary journey by -- as the subtitle says -- "air, train, boat and occasionally very sore feet around the 50,000 miles of the Pacific Rim." The book is full of telling scenes, insightful reflections and revealing encounters -- and is happily laced with Palin's humble, good-humored spirit. The excerpt below focuses on Vietnam, beginning with Palin's passage across the border with China, and traces five days in his 245-day odyssey. DAY 74 In order to reach the border by bus and to have time for all the formalities we are advised to leave early. Wake at five and pack my bags. It is Sod's law that we spend the least time in the most attractive places. Nanning, warm, airy and cheerful, slips away and we roll steadily and unspectacularly south-west along soft-wooded valleys and through scrub-covered hills. The road is straight and empty. As recently as 1979 troops and tanks rolled along here when the Chinese, angered by the Vietnamese invasion of their ally, Cambodia, fought a seventeen-day war before withdrawing. Until 1992, when the Cambodian situation was settled, this border remained firmly closed. Last images of China. A late breakfast in a candlelit restaurant, outside which a turtle shell is being skinned for soup. Despite a power cut we are served omelettes, pumpkin leaf, tarot and sweet potato. A huge "One-child" poster at the border town of Pinxiang, a reminder of the birth control policy. The frontier is eight kilometres beyond Pinxiang at a place called Friendship Pass. The road bursts out from thickly-wooded hills and high cliffs onto a run-down square. In one corner is a handsome, disused cream-and-white French colonial residence, with elegant ironwork balconies, pilastered façade and louvred windows, a relic from the days when this was a northern outpost of French Indo-China. Opposite stands a three-tiered stone pile as clumsy as the other is elegant. It bestrides a triumphal archway called Friendship Gate. Through the arch is a parking area with cypress trees planted around it, where two or three heavy trucks are drawn up. Beyond that is Vietnam. The last rites of Chinese bureaucracy are given from what looks like a requisitioned cow-shed. Behind desks, in stalls separated by concrete partitions, sits a trio of black-uniformed and epauletted officials from customs, immigration and quarantine. There is no sign of ring fences, barbed wire or the usual trappings of military surveillance. This sleepy, tree-shrouded backwater is a most unconvincing exit. The barrier is raised and we make our way down the muddy track to Vietnam. Only then do we notice a big new circular concrete and glass building under construction amongst the trees. This is what will replace the cowshed. To the very last, evidence of China being born. A cold wind blows through Friendship Pass, and there is not much one can do to avoid it. The facilities at the Vietnamese border post at Dong Dang are basic. The steps and wall outside are monopolized by a large and rebellious German tour group which has obviously been here for some considerable time. There is a toilet, situated in a blockhouse behind some nearby bushes, but this reached saturation point years ago and no one goes inside it anymore, preferring to use the bushes themselves. Small, sad-faced Miss Ha, our fixer in Vietnam, waits with inscrutable calm as the enigmatic processes of customs and immigration slowly evolve. The road to Hanoi is equally slow, picking its way between sharp, irregular limestone peaks that give the landscape the look of a workshop, where new mountain designs are tried out. According to my guidebook this frontier area is still heavily mined. Considering that the Chinese were fighting their way through here only sixteen years ago and eight years before that the Americans were bombing the place flat, the countryside looks remarkably unscarred. The red and white kilometer markers the French left behind are still intact, and the rocky fields are carefully tended by men in olive-green pith helmets and tiny old ladies in the conical coolie hats I had expected to see everywhere in China, but never did. After an hour on a rough, meandering road through the mountains we emerge onto the rough, straight road that leads across the rich plain of the Red River delta. The countryside is filled with people. A great throng moves in both directions, like a scene of refugee exodus. Few have cars, most are either walking or on pedal and motor cycles. Every few miles, usually on a low rise beside the road, are monuments to the Vietcong army that defeated the French and the Americans. Nothing grandiose or militaristic; often nothing more than a whitewashed obelisk. The box-girder bridges across the Red River still show patches and repairs from the American bombings of the seventies. We are in the centre of Hanoi by six o'clock -- twelve hours after leaving Nanning. Two hours later I'm sat in a cyclo, something like a bath chair attached to a bicycle frame. My driver, who pedals from behind, moves me at a stately pace up the dimly-lit streets towards the highly recommended "N6" roof-top restaurant. Roof-top means exactly what it says -- eating on a roof, beside pipes and chimneys. Walk back to the hotel marvelling at the night-time activity, the small-scale bustle on the streets. Shops and workshops lit by single strip-lights. There's no neon, no bright-lit billboards, no seething lines of stationary cars. This seems to be a city on a human scale -- busy but not oppressive. I catch myself wondering how it could be so different from China, and making the mistake of merging these countries of the Asian Pacific into one homogeneous "oriental" mass. Vietnam is as distinct from China as South Korea was from Japan. It has its own ancient culture, language and alphabet and its own, instantly appealing style. Tired, but unable to drag ourselves away from these dim, congenial streets, Basil and I take a last beer in a small Thai restaurant by the hotel. The proprietor is friendly. "You like Thai food?" he asks. "Oh, yes." He looks out into the night and sighs. "Yes, one day," he says, "I will go to Thailand." + + + + + + + + DAY 76 The characteristic sound of Hanoi traffic is the tinkle of the bicycle bell and the squawk of the scooter horn. It's a discordant sound, but discordant in quite an acceptable way, like that of a farmyard. It's the sound of traffic at an early stage of evolution, lacking the high-tech swish and roar of Western cities. But Vietnam, like China and Russia, is opening up. Here they call the process Doi-Moi -- "renovation" or "new thinking" -- and it has informed government policy for almost ten years. A managed market economy has replaced the communist command economy. Foreign participation in business is encouraged. It is obligatory for Vietnamese civil servants to learn a foreign language. Walking into town I pass the fruits of this policy. A four-star hotel called The Standard is being developed in partnership with Singaporeans and Malaysians and a South Korean company is building on the site of the old French prison, the Maison Centrale. In the Vietnam war this was the main holding and interrogation centre for captured American servicemen, known, mockingly, as the Hanoi Hilton. Many were tortured here. Now cranes and reinforced concrete piling rise from behind the prison walls and it could indeed become the Hanoi Hilton once again. Only, this time Americans will come to be pampered. While the big developers try to spring their monumental schemes on Hanoi, the city remains defiantly small and low slung. Ninety-five years of colonial rule have left behind a passable imitation of a warm French provincial town based around shady avenues of two and three-storey buildings with stuccoed fronts, wrought iron balconies, pantiled roofs and tall green louvred shutters. Baguettes are sold by the roadside, bicycles are stacked along the broad pavements, cyclos re-route round old ladies with shoulder poles and baskets. I pass a long wall, hung with jackets, in front of which is a heap of clothes languidly supervised by a hollow-cheeked old man and a young boy. A passer-by stops, rummages around, pulls a jacket out from beneath the pile and puts it on. It's hopelessly crumpled, and far too small for him, but the old man and the boy, like men's outfitters anywhere, nod approvingly. In Hanoi, you don't need to hail a taxi, they hail you. Constantly. "Hey you!" I always fall for it, wheeling round as if I'm about to be karate-chopped. So when I do choose a cyclo I go for someone who doesn't seem to be the slightest bit interested in me. His name, it transpires, is Than, an elderly man with a Ho Chi Minh beard, broken teeth and one wandering eye. He wears a workman's blue cotton jacket and a grey-brown pith helmet. Before he mounts the saddle he takes a long gurgling puff from a bamboo pipe, which he then tucks down behind the seat, and mounts the saddle, exhaling slowly and skilfully. With Than I visit the bleak, triumphal square where the remains of Uncle Ho, the father of modern Vietnam and the architect of the victory over the Americans, lie in a forbidding, columned mausoleum of black granite and marble. It's a depressing place for many reasons. For a start he shouldn't be here. Ho Chi Minh expressly requested that he be cremated and his ashes scattered over the countryside. "Ho Chi Minh Will Live For Ever In Our Life", proclaims a red and gold banner beside the tomb. There is not much life around this portentous monument today apart from two boys on bikes practising wheelie turns and a middle-aged woman learning how to ride a motor-scooter. Beside a lake in the middle of town is a theatre where the internationally-known Thang Long Water Puppet Troupe performs. The show is based on the traditional agriculture of Vietnam and particularly the vital importance of the flooding of the paddy-fields to ensure a successful rice harvest. The "stage" is a 20 x 12-foot water tank and the puppets, which range from peasant figures to birds, animals, ceremonial barges and legendary dragons, are all operated on the end of long submerged metal rods by puppeteers you never see. The Water Puppet Theatre reminds me once again of the heady pace of political change in Asia. Twenty-three years ago the Americans were raining bombs down on this city. Now a show which celebrates the resilience of the peasants who defeated them is sponsored by AT&T, one of the largest companies in the USA. + + + + + + + + N E X T+P A G E+| Remnants of the war